Communities must offer mental help resources

By HUBERT G. LOCKE, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, April 26, 2007

The massacre at Virginia Tech on April 16 sent shock waves throughout the nation, but it sent a particular chill down the spine of anyone who has taught or has been an administrator at one of the nation's colleges or universities.

There are few of us who have not encountered a student in class or someone on campus for whom we felt some psychological counseling would be helpful or necessary. Some of us -- likely a number far larger than anyone would wish to admit -- have memories similar to those of the Virginia Tech faculty who recognized they had a student in serious, personal trouble in their midst and who now dearly wish they might have done something more about it.

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I'm among the number of such people with a horrid memory. It happened more than 40 years ago; needless to say, I remember it as if it occurred yesterday.

The details are hazy after four decades; the outcome is not. I was on the staff of the dean of students at the municipal university in my hometown where, among other duties, I served as a liaison between the university and its dozen or so campus chaplains who served the spiritual interests of the university's 20,000-plus students.

I remember being approached one day by an exceptionally intense young man who wanted to organize a Jewish student study group and who, for some reason I no longer recall, did not wish to do so in collaboration with the Hillel Foundation, the campus Jewish religious organization. His refusal to work with the Hillel Foundation was sufficient warrant to turn down his request. Tragically, his intenseness did not alert me or anyone else to what followed. Several weeks (it may have been several months) later, this intense young man went to the largest conservative synagogue in town and fatally shot its senior rabbi as he was conducting Sabbath services.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, pundits and experts of all sorts have appeared with sobering analyses of what went wrong and sage advice on how to deal with such tragedies in the future. For anyone who has lived through such an event or who has a memory like mine of an encounter with someone who turns out to be mentally deranged, the analyses and advice aren't worth the breath expended to utter them.

They come, in many instances, from people who run companies that provide security services and whose interests, accordingly, are not totally selfless. What most of us wish to know is not how to put rapid communication systems and plans in place when a massacre occurs but, rather, how to avoid such horrors in the first place.

No one really knows the answer to this latter question. Some gun-owner enthusiasts have advanced the argument that if everyone were armed, killers of any sort would be mowed down before they had the chance to wreak havoc -- whether in an intrusion in one's home, in a restaurant or like that at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Perhaps so, but it would not give us the kind of society in which I would wish to live. Police officers dread the uncertainties of confronting someone with a weapon who is mentally unbalanced. Imagine a city or an entire country where everyone carries a gun and feels free to shoot anyone who appears threatening. I, for one, would never set foot outside my front door.

What more might the faculty and administrators at Virginia Tech have done? They will undoubtedly ask themselves that question endlessly. The fact is there is likely nothing they could have done -- nor anyone can do -- in large part because none of us can live our lives as though every strange, odd or difficult person we might encounter is a potential mass murderer.

There is a certain price we pay for living in a free and open society of 300 million people -- an undeterminable number of whom are so mentally ill as to present a serious public threat. We cannot put a security person in every school or college classroom or in all the other semi-public places where danger might lurk. And no one would want to live in a society that had to secure itself in such a manner.

The best we can aim for -- and strive to achieve -- are communities that try to provide as many resources and as much professional help as possible for people who are mentally in trouble -- and hope for the best.